Adam Savage, the speaker at my son’s graduation Saturday as a mechanical engineer, made a point equally applicable to his audience of newly fledged engineers as to my audience of those shouldering lots of debt: Look at the big picture.

For engineers, Savage hoped that they would look beyond the technical challenges of any task at hand to see where they, and the gadget they were making, fit in the larger world. For debtors, I want clients to look beyond making this month’s minimum payments to assess whether there is any meaningful chance of paying off the debt and achieving economic stability.

Short term thinking was exemplified recently for me by a client considering refinancing her home mortgage to a smaller payment “like her friend has.” I cautioned about loans with appealing initial payments that soon morph into monsters that the borrower can’t afford, putting the home at risk. Her response, to my dismay, was “I’ll deal with that when it adjusts.”

Looking at the long term was the theme of my recent post on the Bankruptcy Law Network, looking at the differing results if you paid off credit card debt with the contractual minimum payment or put the same money into an IRA over the same period.

Making good decisions about how to deal with a technical or a financial challenge requires that we lift our eyes from the desk in front of us to the future, and look at the bigger picture.